Articles

ERIEP | Number 3 | The challenges facing the European automotive industry

Our account of the interaction between politics and market actors in the French and German automotive industries tries to show how a classical economic explanation is not sufficient to understand and analyse the sector’s current transformation based on the development of the electric car. From an economic-sociological point of view, we analyse how the negotiations between incumbent firms and challengers on the one hand, and public politics on electric cars on the other, affect the existing power balance in the French and German car industries. Although most carmakers are contributing to stabilising the sector’s existing “conception of control” by adapting to the electric vehicle (EV) as a challenge to their strategies, national electric car programmes support carmakers in their desire to control innovation know-how as much as challengers seek to establish themselves in an emerging market. Together with carmakers’ strategies, the role of politics is decisive in determining the degree to which the industry is changing. The transformative influence of politics should thus be taken more explicitly into account by economic sociology.

ERIEP | Number 5 | Cluster policy for innovation and competitiveness

Despite common reference to the cluster concept and some signs of policy convergence, cluster policies differ markedly, reflecting industry characteristics and institutional differences at various spatial scales, or levels of governance. This paper uses the case of Germany to illustrate the variety of regional cluster policies in a federal state. It particularly focuses on the relations, interdependencies and divisions of labour between four levels of governance. Policy learning can be observed either within or between regions and levels of governance, and the evidence shows that path-dependent incremental learning dominates while interregional learning is restricted to certain windows of opportunity.1